


A Star To Lead Him Home

by justbygrace



Series: Pete's World [16]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Baby!Fic, Canon verse, F/M, Pete's World, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-18 02:41:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14203293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justbygrace/pseuds/justbygrace
Summary: What if Rose lied on Bad Wolf Bay?This is a trope I've never written and I figured it was about time I did.





	A Star To Lead Him Home

Rose doesn't tell him the truth when he asks. "You're not..." he says and there's such a look of devastated longing on his face that she regulates her breathing, puts on a smile, and lies through her teeth. Technically it's not completely a lie. Jackie is, after all, pregnant also. He looks relieved and she understands why, she does - two universes don't need to collapse just because a Time Lord fell in love with a human. Instead she forces a smile, a laugh, and clenches her fists so tightly she can feel the individual indentations of her fingernails.

She spends nights lying on the grass in the Tylers' new giant backyard and staring up at the night sky, mapping the constellations, finding the similarities and the differences, and letting her tears soak into the earth. He'd told her - he'd promised - he'd always said...anyway, clearly it wasn't impossible and now she's left alone to handle it. It's here, comforted by the enormity of a space she'll never explore again, that she finds the most solace. She can cry, can scream, can rant, can whisper, can pray, and no one will be the wiser. At first she thinks she's praying to a Lord of Time, but it merges into a whispered monologue to the growing life inside of her.

Everyone thinks she's having a boy, grandmothers plucking her sleeve at the store "you're carrying low - just like my Cecilia" and Jackie's formal pronouncements that most people just generally accept as fact. Rose spends a lot of time thinking about names. Jack, after a Time Agent she could never quite convince her Doctor to be honest about, Mickey for her most loyal friend, even Pete after both the man whose DNA will reside in this new child's bones and the man who sometimes doesn't quite seem to know what happened to his old life but is pretty happy about it anyway. Once, Mickey had even told her to call the baby "Rickey" and it had startled a laugh from her, the first in a long time. In the end, the infant they placed in her arms was a pink and yellow baby daughter with a tuft of brown hair. 

She doesn't need to think about the name, and it slips from her tongue as if she'd known it all along. Star Jacqueline Tyler. Star for the pinpricks of light that so captivate her parents and Jacqueline for the grandmother who Rose hopes has passed on her sharp love and loyalty to the tiny new bundle. She doesn't think the Doctor would mind for his daughter to share a name with his almost mother-in-law. When the thought crosses her mind and she's glad she doesn't have to tell him right away, she realizes she's starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Time passes in Pete's World as surely as it did in her original universe and her daughter grows from a precocious infant into a precocious toddler, surprisingly exactly no one. Life settles into a routine, the house is full of the sounds of two toddlers getting into mischief, and Rose finds herself in the backyard less and less often. Which, as all things in Rose's life tend to happen, is the same time the stars in the sky begin to go out. 

She was never supposed to be the one to operate the Dimension Canon, but everyone sort of forgot to ever tell her that, and when she marched into Torchwood wearing a blue leather jacket like armor, no one tells her she can't. And so she hops dimensions all day and comes home to Star at night and she saves her tears for a time when the world isn't on the verge of ending. Instead she takes her daughter into the backyard and the two lay down side-by-side and Rose tells her stories of the man beyond the fading stars. 

Rose knows immediately when they finally find the right universe. She comes home and tells Jackie while Star and Tony are playing in the next room. Jackie's lips are thin, but she kisses her daughter and holds her tight and they make promises neither of them are sure they can keep. Rose kisses her own daughter and waits till she is out of sight before disappearing. 

She has every intention of telling the Doctor immediately, but then a dalek happens and then they are on a ship full of the things, and then suddenly the TARDIS is materializing. When the newest member of the group walks out in a burst of light, Rose knows what's going to happen. Yes, she knows. And so she bites her tongue and hugs the Doctor-in-brown that much harder and pretends nothing is wrong because it's one of the things she's learned how to do best. 

They stand on a beach and Rose needs to know which of them deserve this life. She isn't sure she wants her daughter to live her life among the stars, but, well, everything on this beach is complicated. And so she accepts the whispered "I love you" as the proof she needs and waits till they are standing hand-in-hand watching a de-materializing TARDIS to tell him he has a daughter. 

She doesn't need a photographer to capture the look on his face when she says it - the awed anticipation and fearful joy - but she's glad she has one when the two meet, this tiny toddler with gravity-defying hair and this tall, skinny man whose eyes are leaking joy even as he drops to his knees. Star clings to both parents like a koala, all knees and elbows and sharp joy and love for her mother and the father she has just met.

Jackie never understood why Rose lied, but Rose explained it to her later, years later, when Tony and Star are teenagers and other children have joined the fray. She doesn't talk about the potential holes in the very fabric of time and space, doesn't mention the abject longing she'd always seen when she'd heard the Doctor interact with children, doesn't use words like "fear" and "destruction" and "the collapse of every multi-verse" and "duty to the universe." Instead she uses words like "hope" and "love" and "joy" and it's probably not very comprehensible, but Jackie looks between her daughter and the tall man with gravity-defying hair who is currently lying face down in the dirt with the whole hoard of children around him and she understands. It isn't about the lie - it's about the potential.


End file.
